Kali strides behind Will like nothing so much as an overgrown housecat with wild markings, her manner so flexible and immense that in between one moment in the next-in between the pendulum swing-she goes from calmly reclining leopard, to something you could almost believe was something...else. The way she moves, the way she looks around, the way she breathes. All of it changes until, suddenly, you're not looking at a leopard anymore. You're looking at the daemon of the killer whose head Will Graham is in. She's not just a leopard. She can make you believe that she's something she's not. She can make herself believe, if only for a second, that she's a dog, a spider, a caracara.
Maybe that's why it's so easy for them to accept the truth. Because in every moment where she tricked them into seeing her as something else, in all their reminders to herself that she is who she is, in all their reminders to themselves to remember that she is harmless, they forget that she is a predator.
It comes as a shock to both of them, this realization that she is a hunter. They'd known it, of course. How could you not? But...they never realized what it meant that she had settled the way she had.
Because most of the time, they're not even themselves long enough to know what is them, and what is the killers whose brains they pick.
But then Will Graham wakes up choking and retching, and Kali snarls against the memories of a marmoset scream torn apart by her claws and teeth.
And in the moment where Jack Crawford and his bloodhound lead her back to the porch-because she'd hidden away from Will, and he'd hidden from her-they both realize in some unspeakable, silent way the truth about themselves.
Because a leopard cannot change its spots, and the tears in their eyes are just another, fruitless brushstroke, trying to paint away the blood on his hands and the Shadows on her lips.